this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.
I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.
I don't particularly care about code size as a user or as a programmer.
Hard drive space is the cheapest thing you've got on a computer.
You could always run gentoo and use -Os ... that can make things a lot smaller but also slower.
I hate this "storage is cheap" mentality, it's a cop out for being wasteful without a reason. "Gas is cheap" was common up to the early 1970s, until it wasn't anymore. "Freshwater is cheap", until it isn't anymore.
Are you willing to give up 1080p screens and 16-bit/44.1kHz sampled music? Or how about languages that can't be represented in ASCII, much less Latin-1? Because handling those take up way more space than code.
Let me quote myself:
And there's almost always a reason. Code size tends to be modest compared to supporting data around it.
I see you've never dealt with a real life project that requires god knows how many different libraries off nodejs because 🤷♂️
Dependency hell takes a lot of space.
I have. Still small compared to the images and such that are used in a user facing application.
Edit: just to bring in real numbers, I have an old TypeScript project that results in a 109M
node_modulesdir. Which I agree is absurd. I also have an old anime video, 21 minutes long, at only 560x432 resolution, 24fps, which takes 171M. And that's my point: even in really bad cases, code size tends to be swamped out by everything else in user-facing applications. If there's any kind of images, music, or video, the code size will be a small part of the complete picture.As a point of comparison, in the last place I worked, the main project had over 600MB of javascript dependencies it pulled from node. Plus 300MB of python libraries for Django and whatever else.
At my current job, preparing your environment for development of one "isolated" php system will need at least 3GB of dependencies. Even the main programmer behind it has no clue how it happened or why.
I'd rather have the audio compressed and decompress in realtime instead of a game taking 100Gb in size. Or maybe give me the option to only download languages I can use.
It's almost always compressed in some way. Still takes up a lot of space. You can fit a lot of compiled code in the space of a 1 minute, 128kbps mp3.
You present a false dichotomy. Yes, things like uncompressed audio and HD video take up more storage space, but that does not negate that modern commercial software is very inefficient with how it uses resources. You could improve the efficiency of the system while keeping HD video, it is not a mutually exclusive choice.
For example, booting up Windows and doing nothing takes up 4gb of RAM, while doing the same with a lean Linux installation would take up a quarter of that, despite both operating systems having identical functionality (run web browser, open applications, edit documents, play games, etc).
Does Windows booting take up that much space because of code, or because of data that code is loading?
4GB is what Windows idles at for me, after everything has loaded.
How much of that is cached state based on the percentage of ram available?
Windows takes a percentage of your available RAM, you can boot it on 4GB RAM and it will use 1GB of so
Sure, and there are some performance gains to be made from it I'm sure, but when my OS is doing that and my web browser is doing that and my browser based chat client and my browser based text editor are all doing that, it gets pretty sluggish.
This is why Linux is a godsend for older machines, even running the exact same applications (Firefox, Discord, and vscode) on the exact same hardware, it still feels more responsive on Linux because there is less overhead from the OS itself.